Intel teases 10nm Ice Lake gaming perf and 5GHz all-core 9900KS

Intel has released a small selection of details concerning its upcoming 10nm Ice Lake mobile CPU and a new special edition desktop processor, the Core i9-9900KS.

The previously-revealed Ice Lake processor will be Intel’s first 10nm CPU produced in volume. As well as Sunny Cove CPU cores, the mobile-centric processor features new Gen11 integrated graphics, which come with support for variable rate shading. Intel has released benchmark results which show that, thanks in part to variable rate shading, Gen 11 graphics can achieve considerably greater performance in certain titles than Gen 9 graphics. Specifically, it measured a 2.08x gain in Total War: Three Kingdoms (1080p, Low preset), a 1.82x boost in Rainbow Six Siege (1080p, Medium preset), and a 1.72x improvement in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (1080p, Medium preset).

Tests for the above comparisons were carried out on an unannounced 15W 4C/8T Ice Lake SKU with 8GB of LPDDR4X running at 3,733MHz, and on the Whiskey Lake Core i7-8565U configured with a peak TDP (PL1) of 20W and featuring Intel HD Graphics 620 running with 16GB of 2,400MHz DDR4 (fastest supported memory). The faster memory on the Ice Lake platform will definitely help it out, so this is not a like-for-like comparison, but the TDP difference does suggest an efficiency gain. Regardless, these figures should of course be taken with a pinch of salt, and we are expecting more details on the above following Intel’s Computex keynote on Tuesday.

Intel has also surprised the industry with news of a new special edition CPU that will supplant the Core i9-9900K as the flagship mainstream offering: the Core i9-9900KS. With the same 14nm Coffee Lake Refresh silicon and featuring the same eight cores and 16 threads as the CPU it’s based on, the Core i9-9900KS differentiates itself by being able to run all eight cores at a sustained Turbo Boost speed of 5GHz (the same as the peak single-core boost speed of the original). So far, it appears to just be a better-binned version of the Core i9-9900K, but details including TDP, pricing, and launch date are yet to be confirmed. Again, we’re hoping more details arrive on Tuesday.